Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Richard Blanco's inaugural poem for Obama is a valiant flop

'One Today' has some fine lines, but writing good poetry
for a grand national celebration is an impossible feat

Could be verse ... Richard Blanco (right)
reads for the Obama family, and the world, at the presidential inauguration in
Washington DC. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The celebratory public poem is an extinct genre in our sceptical postmodern
times, and probably ought to stay that way. It presents the writer with
insurmountable challenges in form, tone and content. How do you praise your
nation wisely – with honesty and caution? How do you root that public voice in
the personal and private spaces where thoughts grow? How do you write a
mass-market poem?

Richard Blanco's new
inauguration poem, "One
Today", composed to usher in Barack Obama's second
term, is a valiant but not always convincing attempt to square the circles.

Ambitious in its length (69 lines), "One Today" reveals a novelistic eye for
detail and broad, sweeping description. It begins, slightly heavy-handedly, with
daybreak: "One sun rose on us today …" The rhymed spondee of "One sun" sets the
recurrent motif, the theme of unity, picked up as the speaker moves through the
day: "One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story/ told by our silent
gestures moving behind windows." Later on, we have "one ground", "one wind" and,
repeated in the last three stanzas "one sky", followed by "one moon" and (you
saw it coming), "one country".Full article